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Azure Management API concerns

Sep 18, 2009
cloud computing review

Disclaimer: this post is based on my (limited) understanding of the Azure Management API, I did start reading the docs only a few hours ago.

Microsoft has just released the first preview of their Management API for Windows Azure.

As far I understand the content of the newly released API, this API just let you automates what was done manually through the Windows Azure Console so far.

At this point, I have two concerns:

  1. No way to adjust your instance count for a given role.
  2. Auto-management (*) involves loads of quirks.

(*) Auto-Management: the ability for a cloud app to scale itself up and down depending on the workload.

I am not really satisfied by this Management API as it does not seem to address basic requirements to easily scale up or down my (future) cloud app.

Being able to deploy a new azure package programmatically is nice, but we were already doing that in Lokad.Cloud. Thanks to the AppDomain restart trick, I suspect we will keep deploying that way, as the deployment through Lokad.Cloud is likely to be still 100x faster.

That being said, the Management API is powerful, but it does not seem to address auto-management, at least not in a simple fashion.

The single feature I was looking forward was being able to adjust the number of instances on-demand through a very very simple API that would have let me do three things:

  1. Create new instance for the current role.
  2. Shut down current instance.
  3. Get the status of instances attached to the current role.

That’s it!

Notice that I am not asking here to deploy a new package, or to change the production/staging status. I just need to be able tweak the instance count.

In particular, I would expect a Non-SSL REST API to do those limited operations, much like the other REST API available for the cloud storage.

Indeed, security concerns related to the instance count management are nearly identical to the ones related to the cloud storage. Well, not really, as in practice securing your storage is way much more sensitive.

Reader Comments (1)

REST API provided by Microsoft simply follows their current deployment strategy. So I’m not even sure if Azure internals allow them to do partial application deployments. It’s interesting to see that all other cloud providers with the REST API do provide such functionality. September 18, 2009 | Rinat Abdullin